


Guiding Stars and Gardens

by belderiver



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Bonding, Canon Compliant, During Canon, F/F, Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 20:08:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13107624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belderiver/pseuds/belderiver
Summary: Midgar hollowed you out, and Aeris had filled the space in with a yearning for all the things a girl from a little mountain town could safely take for granted.





	Guiding Stars and Gardens

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookwormninja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookwormninja/gifts).



Aeris was always falling behind. 

It wasn’t that the rest of the team moved at a strenuous pace. Despite Cloud’s occasional fussing, she was perfectly capable of keeping up - “If not as well as a _SOLDIER_ ,” she had teased, looking to a giggling Tifa for encouragement. It also wasn’t anything like Yuffie’s feet-dragging lollygagging, which was often accompanied by the loud and petulant insistence that she was only so slow because she might drop dead of boredom at any second. On the contrary - it was because Aeris was never bored.

The world fascinated her. The small parts of it, especially. She’d stop and stare, caught up in all the details of the day-to-day. She lingered behind in Kalm to watch clear spring rain run down from the eaves and press the toe of her boots into the soft earth. It turned redder and richer the further from Midgar they travelled, and Aeris grew slower as it did. Her green eyes wandered over the earth, and the clear blue of the sky overhead, and the way it flushed pink on the horizon as their days drew to a close.

More than the rest of them, Tifa understood. Awakening in Midgar after all that had happened was impossibly difficult. It wasn’t just the loneliness or the haunting dreams of fire, either. The city itself was as corrosive to the spirit as the fitful bursts of acid rain were to all its plates and wires and chugging engines. Midgar hollowed you out, and Aeris had filled the space in with a yearning for all the things a girl from a little mountain town could safely take for granted.

“Tell me more,” Aeris insisted, the two of them alone atop a grassy hill, a breeze caught in their hair. The night was warm and had put the rest of the group sound asleep, but Tifa had noticed her awake. She was searching the stars, cataloguing every soft light that been stolen from her by the city haze. Tifa let slip a name, Cassiopeia, and before she knew it, Aeris’ garden-pricked hands were wrapped tight around her calloused ones, leading her away to where they could talk without fear of waking the others.

“I used to be really into this stuff when I was younger,” Tifa laughed, resting her chin on the knee pressed against her chest. She scanned the sky and her memory and lifted a hand - the one not resting gently against Aeris’, against the verdant grass between them - to point out a new constellation. “That one’s Andromeda. Lady of the Heavens, is what my book said.” As a teenager, that title had sounded _so cool_ to her. It still kind of did - but that didn't bear mentioning.

Aeris tipped her head against Tifa’s shoulder, following the line of her muscled arm to where she was pointing. Her nose was scrunched in equal parts doubt and concentration. Her ringlets brushed gently against Tifa's arm.  
“I know it’s not supposed to _really_ look like a lady, but still - how do you tell which ones are supposed to connect to which?” 

“I guess you mostly have to memorize them,” Tifa answered, raking her hand back through her hair instead, trying not to feel self-conscious. Memories of being fourteen and alone with only the stars to confide in waded around the edges of her mind. Aeris was looking at her. She watched people as much as places, and she was always so perceptive. Tifa wondered briefly if those clear green eyes couldn’t somehow see through her, through time, to the nights spent under the watchtower with a guide to the stars and a beat-up pair of binoculars.

“It must have been nice,” Aeris said, and for a moment, Tifa really did panic at the prospect that Ancients could read minds, somehow. It abated when she looked back at Aeris only to see her staring back up at the stars, thoughtful. “I mean, being able to go outside and look up and see all this. It’s just...” she paused, searched for a word, and finished quiet, awed, and maybe a little sad: “Endless.” 

Tifa felt a twinge of something, some not-quite-pity she couldn’t put her finger on. It passed, and it left resolve in its wake. She was good at resolutions, at digging them out from the little sparks of something in herself that she didn’t always understand. She had been a guide once. The people that came through Nibelheim could never quite love those mountains like she loved them at the time. They were far away now, and would never be the same, but she thought if Aeris had strayed through her backwater village, if Aeris had been with her on those early hikes and winding paths - well, she might have appreciated them properly.

“I learned other stuff growing up,” she offered casually, rolling her shoulder. “I guess it’s probably not surprising but I was a real tomboy, you know? So I know about frogs and plants and stuff, too.” She forced her eyes to Aeris’ and watched them brighten ahead of the grin that was blooming on her face. Tifa’s smile back felt weak by comparison, like squinting into the sun.

“Plants, as in flowers? Because I’ve seen a bunch, and I’ve been wondering what their names are, and how to grow them...”

From then on, Tifa fell behind too. The two of them knelt together in thickets and rooted through brambles, their heads pressed together and grass colouring their knees. Aeris pried violets and crocuses out of the soil, dirt caked under her nails, and Tifa tried to remember their names and exactly which nettles could sting. She only got it wrong once, and it wasn’t so bad, lying on the banks of the stream together. They told stories and held their hands under the water until the itching stopped.

“How are those girls so damn slow?” Barret grumbled from somewhere up ahead for the thousandth time.

From behind, Aeris held her upturned hands out to Tifa, cuttings and bulbs from their trip through the canyon collected in them. The breast pockets of her jacket were already stuffed full.

“Hold on to these for me?” she asked, that blossoming grin on her face again, looking a little more impish every time she showed it. Tifa laughed and took her hands, carefully tipping the flowers out into hers. They were precious to the both of them, now.

“Your garden's gonna be something else,” she said, “when you finally get around to planting it.”


End file.
